Is there a guide for kuffars to distinguish the
real from the feigning “moderate” Muslim?
Hugh Fitzgerald
Note from Robert Spencer: The “moderate” Muslim never dies, and I
thought that this 2004 Hugh Fitzgerald discussion of the “moderate Muslim”
bears re-posting now. There are some references clearly reflecting the year of
composition, but not a word has been changed, for it has stood, we think, the
test of time — certainly compared to any comment by Tom Friedman or Nicholas
Kristof, all of whose jejune columns are undone by reality about a week after
they are published.
1. Not only
Muslims, but “islamochristians” objectively promote and push the propagandistic
line that disguises the Jihad (evidence of which can be found worldwide), and
mislead as to both what prompts that Jihad (not “poverty” or “foreign policy”
but the precepts of the belief-system of Islam) and what will sate it (not
Kashmir, not Chechnya, not the absurd “two-state solution,” not continued
appeasement in France and Holland — there is nothing that will sate or satisfy
it, as long as part of the globe is as yet resistent to the rule of Islam).
“Christians” such as Fawaz Gerges or Rami Khoury, or someone who was born a
Christian, such as Edward Said, are Arabs whose views are colored by that
self-perception. Their loyalty to the community and history of Arabs causes
them to be as loyal to the Islamic view of things as if they had been born
Muslim. They stoutly defend Islam against all of Western scholarship (in Orientalism),
or divert attention away from Islam and constantly assert, in defiance of all
the evidence, from Bali to Beslan to Madrid, that the “problem of
Israel/Palestine” — the latest, and most sinister formulation of the Jihad
against Israel — is the fons et origo of
Muslim hostility and murderous aggression throughout the world. Save for the
Copts and Maronites, who regard themselves not as Arabs but as “users” of the
“Arabic language” (and reject the idea that such “users” therefore become
“Arabs”), many Arab Christians have crazily embraced the Islamic agenda; the
agenda, that is, of those who have made the lives of Christians in the Middle
East so uncertain, difficult, and at times, imperilled. The attempt to be “plus islamiste que les islamistes” — the approach of
Rami Khoury and Hanan Ashrawi — simply will not do, for it has not worked. It
is Habib Malik and other Maronites in Lebanon who have analysed the problem of
Islam in a clear-eyed fashion. Indeed, the best book on the legal status of
non-Muslims under Islam is that of the Lebanese (Maronite) scholar Antoine
Fattal.
Any
“islamochristian” Arab who promotes the Islamic agenda, by participating in a
campaign that can only mislead Infidels and put off their understanding of
Jihad and its various instruments, is objectively as much part of the problem
as the Muslim who knowingly practices taqiyya in order to turn aside the
suspicions of non-Muslims. Whoever acts so as to keep the unwary Infidel unwary
is helping the enemy.
Think, for a minute, of Oskar Schindler. A member of the
Nazi Party, but hardly someone who followed the Nazi line. But what if
Schindler had at some point met with Westerners — and had continued, himself,
to deny that the Nazis were engaged in genocide, even if he himself deplored it
and would later act against it? Would we think of him as a “moderate”? As
someone who had helped the anti-Nazi coalition to understand what it was up
against?
Or for another example, think of Ilya Ehrenburg, who in
1951 or so was sent abroad by Stalin to lie about the condition of
Yiddish-speaking intellectuals whom Stalin had recently massacred. Ehrenburg
went to France, went to Italy. He did as he was told. “Peretz? Markish? Oh,
yes, saw Peretz at his dacha last month with his grandson. Such a jovial
fellow. Markish — he was great last year in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District — you should see how it comes across in zhargon, Yiddish…” And so it
went. Eherenburg lied, and lied. He was not a Stalinist. He hated Stalin. He of
course hated the destruction of Peretz, Markish, and many others who had been
killed many months before — as Ehrenburg knew perfectly well. When he went
abroad and lied to the editors of Nouvelle Revue Francaise, what was he? Objectively, he
was promoting the interests of Joseph Stalin, and the Red Army, and the
Politburo. We need not inquire into motives. We need only see what the results
of such lying were. And the same is true of those Christian Arabs who lie on
behalf of Islam — some out of fear, some out of an ethnocentric identification
so strong that they end up defending Islam, the religion of those who
persecuted the Christian Arabs of the Middle East, and some out of venality (if
Western diplomats and journalists can be on the Arab take, why not Arabs
themselves?), some out of careerism. If you want to rise in the academic ranks,
and your field is the Middle East, unless you are a real scholar — Cook or
Crone or Lewis — better to parrot the party line, which costs you nothing and
gains you friends in tenure-awarding, grant-giving, reference-writing circles.
There is at least one example, too, among those mentioned, in a situation where
an Arabic-speaking Christian, attempting to find refuge from Muslim
persecution, needed the testimony of an “expert” — which “expert,” instead of
offering a pro-bono samaritan act, demanded so much money to be involved (in a
fantastic display of greed) that the very idea of solidarity among Arab
Christians was called by this act permanently into question.
2. The word “moderate” cannot be reasonably applied to
any Muslim who continues to deny the contents — the real contents, not the
sanitized or gussied-up contents — of Qur’an, hadith, and sira. Whether that
denial is based on ignorance, or based on embarrassment, or based on filial
piety (and an unwillingness to wash dirty ideological laundry before the
Infidels) is irrelevant. Any Muslim who, while seeming to deplore every aspect
of Muslim aggression, based on clear textual sources in Qur’an and hadith, or
on the example of Muhammad as depicted in the accepted sira — Muhammad that
“model” of behavior — is again, objectively, acting in a way that simply
misleads the Infidels. And any Muslim who helps to mislead Infidels about the
true nature of Islam cannot be called a “moderate.” That epithet is simply
handed out a bit too quickly for sensible tastes.
3. What of a Muslim who says — there are terrible things
in the sira and hadith, and we must find a way out, so that this belief-system
can focus on the rituals of individual worship, and offer some sustenance as a
simple faith for simple people? This would require admitting that a great many
of Muhammad’s reported acts must either be denied, or given some kind of
figurative interpretation, or otherwise removed as part of his “model” life. As
for the hadith, somehow one would have to say that Bukhari, and Muslim, and the
other respected muhaddithin had not examined those isnad-chains with quite the
right meticulousness, and that many of the hadith regarded as “authentic” must
be reduced to the status of “inauthentic.” And, following Goldziher, doubt
would have to be cast on all of the hadith, as imaginative elaborations from
the Qur’an, without any necessarily independent existence.
4. This leaves the Qur’an. Any “moderate” who wishes to
prevent inquiry into the origins of the Qur’an — whether it may be the product
of a Christian sect, or a Jewish sect, or of pagan Arabs who decided to
construct a book, made up partly of Christian and Jewish material mixed with
bits and pieces of pagan Arab lore from the time of the Jahiliya — or to
prevent philological study (of, for example, Aramaic and other loan-words) —
anyone who impedes the enterprise of subjecting the Qur’an to the kind of
historical inquiry that the Christian and Jewish Bibles have undergone in the
past 200 years of inquiry, is not a “moderate” but a fervent Defender of the
Faith. One unwilling to encourage such study — which can only lead to a move
away from literalness for at least some of the Believers — again is not
“moderate.”
5. The conclusion one must reach is that there are, in
truth, very few moderates. For if one sees the full meaning of Qur’an, hadith,
and sira, and sees how they have affected the behavior of Muslims both over
1400 years of conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and in stunting the
development — political, economic, moral, and intellectual — of Muslims
everywhere, it is impossible not to conclude that this imposing edifice is not
in any sense moderate or susceptible to moderation.
What must an intelligent Muslim, living through the hell
of the Islamic Republic of Iran, start to think of Islam? Or that Kuwaiti
billionaire, with houses in St. James Place and Avenue Foch and Vevey, as well
as the family/company headquarters in Kuwait City, who sends his children to
the American School in Kuwait, and boasts that they know English better than
they know Arabic, helps host Fouad Ajami when he visits Kuwait, is truly
heartsick to see Kuwait’s increasing islamization? Would he allow himself to
say what he knows in public, or in front of half-brothers, or to friends —
knowing that at any moment, they may be scandalized by his free-thinking views,
and that he may run the risk of losing his place in the family’s pecking order
and, what’s more, in the family business?
The mere fact that Muslim numbers may grow in the Western
world represents a permanent threat to Infidels. This is true even if some, or
many, of those Muslims are “moderates” — i.e. do not believe that Islam has
some kind of divine right, and need, to expand until it covers the globe and
swallows up dar al-harb. For if they are still to be counted in the Army of
Islam, not as Deserters (Apostates) from that Army, their very existence in the
Bilad al-kufr helps to swell Muslim ranks, and therefore perceived Muslim
power. And even the “moderate” father may sire immoderate children or
grandchildren — that was the theme of the Hanif Kureishi film, quasi-comic but
politically acute, “My Son the Fanatic.” Whether through Da’wa or large
families, any growth in the Muslim population will inhibit free expression (see
the fates of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the threats made to Geert
Wilders, Carl Hagen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others), for politicians eager
to court the Muslim vote will pooh-pooh Muslim outrages and strive to have the
state yield to Muslim demands — for the sake of short-term individual gain. And
Muslim numbers, even with “moderates,” increases the number of Muslim
missionaries — for every Muslim is a missionary — whether conducting “Sharing Ramadan”
Outreach in the schools (where a soft-voiced Pakistani woman is usually the
soothing propagandist of choice), or Da’wa in a prison. The more Muslims there
are, the more there will be — and no one knows which “moderate” will end up
distinctly non-moderate in his views, and then in his acts.
And this brings up the most important problem: the
impermanence of “moderate” attitudes. What makes anyone think that someone who
this week or month has definitely turned his back on Jihad, who will have
nothing to do with those he calls the “fanatics,” if he does not make a clean
break with Islam, does not become a “renegade” or apostate, will at some point
“revert” not to Islam, which he never left, but to a more devout form, in which
he now subscribes to all of its tenets, and not merely to a few having to do
with rites of individual worship?
6. The examples to the contrary are both those of
individuals, and of whole societies. As for individual Muslims, some started
out as mild-mannered and largely indifferent to Islam, and then underwent some
kind of crisis and reverted to a much more fanatical brand of Islam. That was
the case with urban planner Mohammad Atta, following his disorienting encounter
with modern Western ways in Hamburg, Germany — Reeperbahn and all. That was
also the case with “Mike” Hawash, the Internet engineer earning $360,000 a
year, who seemed completely integrated (American wife, Little League for the
children, friends among fellow executives at Intel who would swear up and down
that he was innocent) — until one fine day, after the World Trade Center
attacks, he made out his will, signed the house over to his wife, and set off
to fight alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (he got as far as
China) against his fellow Americans. In other words, if fanatical Muslims
exist, it does not mean that they all start out as fanatics. Islam is the
necessary starting place, and what sets off a “moderate” may have little to do
with anything the Infidels do, any question of foreign policy — it may simply
be a crisis in an individual Muslim’s life, to which he seeks an answer, not
surprisingly, in … more Islam.
7. Much the same lesson can be drawn from the experience
of whole societies. In passing, one can note that the position of Infidels
under the Pahlavi regime was better than it had been for centuries — and under
the regime that followed, that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that position
of Infidels became worse than it had been for centuries. “Secularism” in
Islamic countries is never permanent; the weight and the threat of Islam is
ever-present.
The best example of this is Turkey since 1924, when
Ataturk began his reforms. He tried in every way he could — through the Hat Act
(banishing the salat-friendly fez); commissioning a Turkish translation of the
Qur’an and an accompanying tafsir (commentary) in Turkish; ending the use of
Arabic script for Turkish; establishing government control of the mosques (even
attacking recalcitrant imams and destroying their mosques); giving women the
right to vote; establishing a system that discouraged the wearing of the hijab;
encouraging Western dress; and discouraging, in the army, preferment of any
soldier who showed too great an interest in religion. This attempt to constrain
Islam was successful, and was reinforced by the national cult of Ataturk.
But the past few decades have shown that Islam does not
die; it keeps coming back. In Turkey, it never went away, despite the creation
of a secular stratum of society that amounts perhaps to 25% of the population,
with another 25% wavering, and 50% still definitely traditional Muslims.
Meanwhile, Turks in Germany become not less, but more fervent in their faith.
And Turks in Turkey, of the kind who follow Erdogan, show that they may at any
moment emerge and take power — and slowly (very slowly, as long as that EU
application has not been acted on, one way or another) they can undo Ataturk.
He was temporary; Islam is forever.
8. That is why even the designation of some Muslims as
“moderates” in the end means almost nothing. They swell Muslim numbers and the
perceived Muslim power; “moderates” may help to mislead, to be in fact even
more effective practitioners of taqiyya/kitman, for their motive may simply be
loyalty to ancestors or embarrassment, not a malign desire to fool Infidels in
order to disarm and then ultimately to destroy them.
9. For this reason, one has to keep one’s eye always on
the objective situation. What will make Infidels safer from a belief-system
that is inimical to art, science, and all free inquiry, that stunts the mental
growth, and that is based on a cruel Manichaean division of the world between
Infidel and Believer? And the answer is: limiting the power — military,
political, diplomatic, economic power — of all Muslim polities, and Muslim peoples,
and diminishing, as much as possible, the Muslim presence, however amiable and
plausible and seemingly untroubling a part of that presence may appear to be,
in all the Lands of the Infidels. This is done not out of any spirit of enmity,
but simply as an act of minimal self-protection — and out of loyalty and
gratitude to those who produced the civilization which, however it has been
recently debased by its own inheritors, would disappear altogether were Muslims
to succeed in islamizing Europe — and then, possibly, other parts of the world
as well.
10. “There are Muslim moderates. Islam itself is not
moderate” is Ibn Warraq’s lapidary formulation. To this one must add: we
Infidels have no sure way to distinguish the real from the feigning “moderate”
Muslim. We cannot spend our time trying to perfect methods to make such
distinctions. Furthermore, in the end such distinctions may be meaningless if
even the “real” moderates hide from us what Islam is all about, not out of any
deeply-felt sinister motive, but out of a humanly-understandable ignorance
(especially among some second or third-generation Muslims in the West), or
embarrassment, or filial piety. And finally, yesterday’s “moderate” can
overnight be transformed into today’s fanatic — or tomorrow’s.
Shall we entrust our own safety to the dreamy
consolations of the phrase “moderate Muslim” and the shapeshifting concept
behind it that can be transformed into something else in a minute?
